9th August 2011 Archive

The Police Federation of Australia has renewed calls for dedicated mobile broadband spectrum for Australia’s public safety agencies, dismissing the telecommunications industry’s suggestion that carrier services could meet their needs.

Charlie Kindel – the general manager of the Windows Phone Developer Ecosystem and a 21-year Microsoft veteran – is leaving the company for a mystery startup. But he still forbids his kids to use Google.

NBN Co, the company building Australia’s National Broadband Network, has responded to concerns that its services price small ISPs out of the market, announcing tariff rebates for capacity charges during the start-up phase.

Blimey, things were heating up in London last night. To hide away from riots indoors and play your favourite videogames won't help, though. In fact according to one policeman, it's part of the problem.

Not an app dedicated to the vicissitudes of India’s currency or an equivalent of Grindr for fans of watersports. No, RunPee is an app designed to tell when the best time is to dash out of a cinema auditorium and take a quick tinkle, without missing too much of the action.

We sort of knew we'd rue the day we asked you lot for your suggestions as to how exactly to launch our Low Orbit Helium Assisted Navigator (LOHAN) spaceplane, and so it turned out to be, as were were buried under a veritable bucketload of ballockets.

Microsoft's former UK enterprise partner director and board member Simon Negus is suing the software giant for wrongful dismissal months after it slapped a writ on him to repay part of a bonus and holiday money.

Italian scientists have devised what they reckon is a viable plan to deal with the menace of large chucks of space debris: a robotic satellite which will grapple the junk, attach a propellant kit and dispatch it to a fiery death in the Earth's upper atmosphere.

For years Private Eye has been making fun of 24-hour rolling news, and its pointless obsession with Going Live! It documented how this crept into scheduled bulletins – reporters standing pointlessly in front of empty buildings or roundabouts, where nothing at all was happening. The internet seemed to make rolling 24-hour news almost completely redundant. But now we can see, it all depends how you do it.

The Explorist 710 is top of the line in Magellan’s new x10 series of multi-purpose GPS devices and offers preloaded topographical maps, turn-by-turn navigation, geocaching, tracking and a host of other features in one handy robust unit.

Skytap, the lab automation cloud maker funded in part by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is adding features to its eponymous tool to make it more useful for companies wrestling with deploying applications on public and private clouds.

Security researchers have detailed further flaws in the femtocell base station technology supplied by mobile carriers to consumers and small businesses as a means to improve 3G mobile connectivity in buildings by taking advantage of existing broadband connections.

A hacking group claims to have broken into two email accounts maintained by Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik, the far-right extremist who killed more than 70 people in attacks that shocked the world last month.

Microsoft has released 13 updates that patch security holes in a wide range of its software offerings, including vulnerabilities rated critical in its Internet Explorer browser and Windows server operating systems.

Silicon Valley likes nothing more than to fetish the Next Big Technology Trend, be it cloud or NoSQL or scripting languages. The problem is that the real world moves much more slowly, and has very different considerations fueling its technology decisions. Perhaps nowhere is this clearer than in the technology media's infatuation with NoSQL, even as the world plods along with SQL.